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While panic set in around his office and he was scrambling around, I opened up a datastore browser and was shocked. Nobody could login or get Exchange email.
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Within minutes, his phone was exploding with calls. When he tried to migrate to another datastore, vCenter threw an error stating that “the file mismatchDC-vmdk could not be found” and shut down the VM. One of them happened to be his Domain Controller, which I will call ‘MismatchDC”. As I prepared to leave, he decided to perform a few Storage vMotion operations on VMs he had renamed, causing mismatched folder names within the datastore. We covered several other topics over the next few hours such as vMotion, Storage vMotion, and basic VM operations. He was at significant risk, and I recommended a more aggressive snapshot schedule as well as a more comprehensive backup plan. This protected him for less than one day. I pointed out to him that his snapshot schedule created one snapshot per hour, keeping 12 snapshots. The rest of his VMs were unprotected other than EqualLogic snapshots. Little did I know that ‘down the road’ would be 2 hours later.Īs the next few hours progressed, I found that he was using BackupExec agents within his critical business applications (2 VMs) and backing up directly. There was a knowledge and comfort gap that could cause problems down the road if he became careless. While the hardware layout was solid and installed well, it quickly became apparent that the SysAdmin was a duck out of water. They are running vSphere 4.1 on Dell servers and EqualLogic storage. Last week I was onsite with a new customer, spending some time familiarizing myself with their existing infrastructure.